I don’t think Israel’s government cares.

“TikTok does what every social media company does but this time it’s Chinese so it’s bad” is what this headline should really say.

You have guessed right. The US government had a massive hand in the creation of modern social media, such as a significant amount of funding for Facebook during its startup phase. The intelligence agencies are mad that they can’t pull data from TikTok or influence its algorithms, on top of the American social media companies wanting to kill off their foreign competition as much as possible.

This bill has nothing to do with data privacy because if Congress cared about that they would’ve banned other platforms too. It’s about control and unfair competition.

The “data privacy” argument is bullshit and the people pushing for this law know it. That’s what is being sold to people but it is not why this TikTok ban got passed. It got passed because American social media companies are pissed that TikTok is outcompeting them for the attention of young people, and because the US government has a heavy hand in what algorithms are allowed to push on Facebook and Google and others. A good portion of Facebook’s initial funding came from government sources.

“Data privacy” is just an excuse. Lobbying from the intelligence agencies and social media companies is why it’s really being enacted.

The history speaks for itself. China is less of a threat to other countries in the world than the USA is. Your idea that they’re some international boogeyman that’s going to take over the entire world and doom humanity is just you repeating “China bad and scary” State Department propaganda.

Even with China’s human rights record being what it is, they don’t export war across the entire world.

This comment was brought to you by the US State Department.

Tell me, how many countries’ governments has China knocked over in the last century as compared to the US CIA?

How many countries did the US drop bombs on in the last decade, and how many did China?

It’s not even close. In terms of physical violence the US is the world’s #1 exporter.

There’s never been a day where I regretted deleting my Reddit account and removing that site from my life. It’s only gotten worse since I left.

Snap has always bothered me and this is another great reason why.

Oh I see what you meant than. Older and cheaper would definitely fit your application better and all of Framework’s stuff is expensive. Repairable and upgradeable comes at a cost!

What concerns you about Framework’s chipsets?

If you need cheap, and “built for a group”, an existing SBC and custom-printed enclosures are likely the best option.

I seem to remember that, for a couple years after DDR4 became the standard, it was significantly more expensive than DDR3.

I just checked in my own, you can change the toolbar to the top of the screen in the “Customize” page of the settings.

Anyone who says paid software is guaranteed to be better is either selling you something or delusional.

FOSS has almost never disappointed me as an end user. Windows disappoints me every time I use it.

In seriousness, I have used Mint as a daily driver for probably 7 years now and I have found only the MATE and xfce flavors to be properly reliable and stable. Cinnamon, no matter how many times and on what hardware I’ve tried it, has a lovely habit of crashing and freezing at random times. For normal desktop tasks, Linux Mint xfce has been more reliable than any Windows I’ve ever used.

Have you considered that you might have Bad Vibes? Maybe the installer is afraid.

You say that, but just like with XP, Microsoft announced a paid subscription to Windows 10 security updates for up to 3 years after the EOL date. There are probably a good number of companies who haven’t switched yet or will not be able to switch easily.

I think you’re massively over-generalizing here to make Linux look like an unstable mess. Rolling release distros are the ones that want you to read the patch notes. Arch is the poster child for those. Stable distros like Mint and Ubuntu and elementaryOS don’t brick your system with every update. They hold back updates and stick with older kernels to ensure stability. Linux is, already, very good. It sounds like you haven’t used it for any length of time. Valve’s work on Proton has made Linux gaming viable for a whole lot of people, but the majority of computer users don’t play intense video games. They want web browsing, email, office software, that kind of thing. Linux does those just great on almost any device all the way down to Raspberry Pi boards.

I have an older touchscreen, non-backlit e-ink Nook, and I don’t use any of the Web interfacing or store to buy books. I do all my library management and acquisition on desktop and then USB transfer it. Mine freezes and stutters occasionally, mostly when browsing menus or waking up from standby mode, so it’s not perfect. But it’s acceptable and I’ve done plenty of reading on it. Mostly it was cheap. I think I paid less than $40 for mine used. My last Kindle was a Kindle 3G and it behaved pretty much the same after I jailbroke it to read epub format.

Personally I just abandoned my Kindle library when I bought a Nook. That’s not particularly helpful, of course, but it’s what I did as part of kicking Amazon out of my life entirely. I started buying my books from non-DRM sources.

I will say this: you may have paid for “licenses” for those books, but you don’t actually own them. Amazon can rip away your access to them at any time. Were it me, I’d simply pirate DRM-free copies of the same books. Though if you can successfully strip off the DRM and convert them to open-source formats, that’s just as good and carries less risk. Every time I’ve converted ebook formats with Calibre it’s done weird stuff to the text: letters incorrectly interpreted, missing punctuation, page breaks in odd places, and enough of them to be annoying. Something to consider. Maybe that kind of thing can be corrected but I haven’t yet figured out how.

We can only hope that, like the citizens of Rapture, the rich tech-bros go insane from their own fumes and start eating each other.